Arcanum spiritual successors progress?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by The Pigeon, Oct 30, 2016.

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  1. The Pigeon

    The Pigeon Member

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    Way back in the mists of time (so at least earlier than yesterday) when I was here last some people were working on spiritual successors to Arcanum. Any of them make any head way?

    As for me, I've been learning the Unreal 4 engine and Blender to make my own. Spent a lot of today and yesterday making making a 3D Rat in Blender (arcanum style, not real world) and am almost done with the basic mesh.
     
  2. Arthgon

    Arthgon Well-Known Member

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    Wow. I really have thought that The Tree got all of you guys/gals. Well, I have not been here for awhile so I am not sure if someone is still working on it. (cannot remember at this moment*, sorry) Jwrac was working on something, but that was not Arcanum 2.

    How's the 3D Rat and the basic mesh going?

    *Yeah, The memory is the first one to go, ah?
     
  3. The Pigeon

    The Pigeon Member

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    Fear not, I still live. Been busy with life. For a fair while I looked at tutes on doing stuff in Direct X and C++ but unfortunately after I moved to later versions of it the tutes dried up. I like to code but in the end I gave in and have started learning a game engine. I didn't realize just how swiftly years can pass :p

    My game will be - rules wise - a modified version of the Arcanum game. Similar leveling system and magic/tech dynamic but magic will be heavily rearranged and there will be (hopefully) more tech stuff. It's been evolving in my mind for years but is starting to coalesce now. Story and world wise it'll be enormously different. I have a rough outline of how I want the plot to unfold but needs a fair bit of fleshing out to do.

    For the rat, the ears and eyes need to be done, the mesh slightly adjusted in a few places and the whole thing rigged, animated and textured. For now I'll be sticking to finishing the ears, eyes, rigging and animating and learn how to load that into unreal 4. What's a good site that'll allow me to embed images in a forum post? I want to show you a screen shot :)
     
  4. Arthgon

    Arthgon Well-Known Member

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    It is cool to hear that you still working on something. Which game engine are you using? I love to hear more about it; how it is going to look like and how the story and world wise it is going to be. And yes....time really goes waaaaay too fast. Much too fast.

    I'm working on several projects (circa 20, but I'm not sure if I've to count several computer versions of the animations of Monsters, NPCs of each game as separately as well) for an Ultima Site (UC). You could say that I just cannot work on one thing first. It usually goes like this; I'm working on something....and then....oh...shiny. Yeah. You could say that I just cannot work on one thing first. However, I'm getting there.

    I always have used https://imageshack.us/ to put images here. It always have worked for me.
     
    Last edited: Oct 31, 2016
  5. The Pigeon

    The Pigeon Member

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    Thank you :) I'm using the Unreal 4 game engine. Currently have been learning blue prints to do the code, will look into C++ later. Appearance wise it will be heavily inspired by Arcanum but I'll be taking some stuff out, adding a lot of my own inventions. World wise I don't want to spoil anything (I intend to have a big reveal) but early on I intend that the player discovers they are on the north one of 4 large landmasses and that everyone is at least partly suffering from amnesia. Often recalling events from right before the start of the game is difficult and what can be recalled often doesn't make sense, people acting in ways they wouldn't, creatures or towns exist in ways that would not occur naturally or logically. The player ultimately has to go on a quest to find out more about the world, what is happening in it and why. It is very tempting to reveal the end :p But I'll do my best to finish this and have people discover it for them selves.

    I intend it to be possible to complete the game either entirely through dialogue or combat or a mix of both. I'll try and put in stealth but I'll probably run out of motivation if I try to do too much :p There will be (as of now) 2 small races, 3 medium and 2 large. I was inspired by a commentator somewhere wishing that races weren't always humanoid so 3 of the races will not be. I want to avoid at least some fantasy tropes so no elves, halflings, gnomes or orcs. A human sized equivalent of dwarves will be there and there will be a pretty race, but they will be large and tough. I may add in more races later.

    This is the rat so far:

    http://imageshack.com/a/img923/5475/VOY2Tn.png

    Sounds like you're doing a lot of projects! Which ones are you furthest along in? What are the worlds like? It all sounds interesting :)
     
  6. Arthgon

    Arthgon Well-Known Member

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    The rat looks good and all sounds very interesting. What for creatures are you going to do then? Will the player be alone or can NPCs join?

    Everything of my projects have to do with the Ultima games* that have been made by Origin. I'm the furthest with the making of a complete tileset of the SNES version of Runes of Virtue 2. (but that is actually a surprise..sssstt)

    Others projects are putting the animations together and into a GIF (using a site where you can do this) of the different versions (C64, Apple II, PC-88, FM-Towns, MSX, etc) of every Monsters, NPCs that you can encounter in Akalabeth, Ultima I, Ultima II, Ultima III, IV, V, VI, Runes of Virtue I and II (GB and SNES). I will put these in the Monster Data on a website that is fully dedicated to Ultima. (Ultima Codex)

    Example: a Jester of the Apple II and C64 version of Ultima III: JesterAppleIIU3.gif JesterC64U3.gif

    To get all the animations I play the games and use Prt Scrn to capture the images. Then I put them by hand together (and of course check if the animations are looking correct) and use the site http://www.online-image-editor.com/gifmaker/ to create them into one GIF.

    What about to correct order of the animations? Well, for the GB, SNES, MSX, NES you can use the program YY-CHR. This is a graphic editing program, which can edit bitplane formats of most of the consoles. A really good one.

    There is also one for the Amiga, Atarti ST (http://retrospec.sgn.net/game/gfxrip) and one for the C64 (http://www.studiox64.co.uk/c64ripr.php).

    PS: my apologies, that I'm a bit unclear. I'm not sure how to say this. Sorry.

    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_(series)
     
    Last edited: Nov 1, 2016
  7. TheDavisChanger

    TheDavisChanger Well-Known Member

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    Is Blender needed to create the assets for the engine?
     
  8. The Pigeon

    The Pigeon Member

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    @Arthgon

    Thank you, I intend to make a human model and then some scenery, probably houses and trees. I hope to learn how to make something like world ed in Arcanum for my game. I also intend for the player to be able to hire or otherwise have other people/things join the player throughout their journey. Initially the amount of stuff in the game will be an ultra thin skeleton of what I intended to put in to make sure I actually get it done and then I'll flesh it out. I have a million and one things I'd love to put in, so if I do the minimum and then add stuff in piece by piece I hope that will overcome the psychological hurdle of how much there is to do.

    I.e.

    - Lots of different kinds of hirelings
    - About 12 colleges of magic each with at least 10-15 spells (plus some hidden spells the player can find/buy). There will be 5 normal levels of spells per magic plus a 6th hidden one.
    - All or almost all the old tech disciplines but with each level of tech having multiple options instead of a single one
    - A wide range of locations from large cities and caves to small areas like single buildings or wilderness landmarks
    - A large number of locations
    - Many different kinds of monster
    - At least 2 ways of finishing the game (combat and dialogue) with hopefully also stealth

    I don't know how many millennia that will all take :p But if I finish all that I hope to allow the player to make their own towns anywhere they like and have faction/vs large scale battles but I'll be happy if I even finish part of the above P

    I only wish I had more time to do dev stuff at the moment but then I supposed finishing preparing for my wedding should come first :p I'm getting married in a few days :)

    Don't worry about your post, I understood the vast majority of it and it sounds interesting. I haven't played the games mentioned myself but I'll check out those links when I got a moment and see what they're like. I've done a bit of sprite stuff myself so I can only imagine the amount effort required to do what you're doing. It all sounds very impressive from what you've described and I wish you all the best with your projects!

    @TheDavisChanger

    I don't think so. I'm just using it because it's free and has a fair amount of features.
     
  9. Arthgon

    Arthgon Well-Known Member

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    Getting married? Cool. Congratulations! (Or should I say good luck? ;) )

    I really hope that you get it all done.
     
  10. The Pigeon

    The Pigeon Member

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  11. TheDavisChanger

    TheDavisChanger Well-Known Member

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    How is Blender being used?
     
  12. The Pigeon

    The Pigeon Member

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    @TheDavidChanger Sorry I took a while to reply, been a crazy time with wedding stuff and getting my wife's visa sorted.

    I'm using blender to create the 3D models at the moment. I don't know yet how to get them into the game but I intend to use it to have animated models with textures on them as well as non animated models. I know you can make movie files in Blender and probably other things too but at the moment I'm sticking to making static 3D models and will soon be looking into loading them into my game.

    Speaking of which I have begun work on menus with placeholder art. As of now one can see some buttons, background images and when you click a button it goes from the main menu to the single player menu. I am quite happy with that :)
     
  13. TheDavisChanger

    TheDavisChanger Well-Known Member

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    The blokes developing Project Zomboid ditched hand drawn sprites in favor of sprites generated from rotated 3D models. This was intended to save time and enable the modding community to create their own sprites based on 3D models they generated and Blender was called out as a program that could be used to do this. Maybe if you checked out some of their development logs you could tease out a way to get these assets into your game.
     
  14. The Pigeon

    The Pigeon Member

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    Thanks for the advice :) I actually found a video that shows one how to load models, though it never hurts to have different ones available in case one of them doesn't work
     
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